Flight crew members of modern, highly-automated aircraft are tasked with maintaining awareness of many flight critical parameters and auto-flight modes. While there are many safety sub-systems that will alert pilots to unsafe operation conditions, these are designed to be “the last line of defense”, and often come very late in an evolving unsafe situation. As a result, they often induce a startle response in the pilot during a flight critical phase, such as final approach, where pilot workload and stress are already high. Unfortunately, these alerts can occur too late for a pilot to orient themselves to the situation and execute the correct recovery action.
The operating assumption is that if information is presented via a flight display element in the aircraft, a flight crew member is aware of it. This assumption is countered by substantial research and multitudes of accidents and incidents where flight crew members were unaware of even the most salient and incessant visual and/or audio alerts. While flight crew members are trained to conduct stereotypic, regular scans of instruments, research also indicates that most flight crew members, and even flight instructors, do not do so. This scan is designed to insure that flight crew members regularly sample the state of flight critical parameters, such as airspeed, altitude, auto-flight mode, engine state, and vertical speed. However, if flight crew members do not adequately review some flight deck display element, they may not comprehend the import of a change. In some cases, a flight crew member could briefly look at a display element without registering the mission impact (e.g., “looking but not seeing”). This is particularly important in single pilot operations where the pilot flying does not have a pilot monitor whose primary responsibility is to monitor for such changes.
Another exacerbating factor is that auto-flight systems have authority to transition automated modes without requiring flight crew acknowledgment, which is often only indicated by a subtle change on a mode annunciation display. During heavy task loads, flight crew members are frequently unaware of these changes or the communication of the change somehow fails despite using commonly accepted crew resource management (CRM) practices.
Accordingly, it is desirable to assess awareness of changes, especially flight mode changes, to ensure that a flight crew member is, in fact, aware of the airplane state to support decision making and intervention if necessary. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.